Mediating gendered performances: young people negotiating embodiment in research discussions

Abstract

Gender inequalities in schools have implications for life chances, emotional well-being and educational policies and practices, but are apparently resistant to change. This paper employs Judith Butler’s conceptualisation of performativity in a study of young people and consumption to provide insights into gendered inequities. It argues that how the young people ‘do’ gender in focus groups frequently involves the discussion of young women’s bodies and clothes in ways that are ‘culturally intelligible’. The focus on young women’s bodies produced joking relationships and a taken-for-granted understanding of gender in some same-sex interactions, but sometimes created tension and divisions in mixed-gender groups. Discussions of sexualisation in single-sex and mixed-sex groups were similarly emotionally loaded. The paper argues that attention to gender inequalities requires detailed attention to the differential power relations in which boys express desires to control feminine bodies and girls police their own and other girls’ bodies. Methodologically, the paper suggests that focus group discussions constitute an ethnographic site for analysis and that researchers co-construct young people’s narratives of embodied gender practices in ways that mediate young people’s gendered performances.

Keywords:

• consumption
• embodiment
• femininities
• gender
• focus groups
• masculinities
• performativity

Notes

1. Economic and Social Research Council Grant No. R0002392871 awarded to Christine Griffin and Ann Phoenix, with Rosaleen Croghan and Janine Hunter being the Research Fellows on the project. Rob Pattman assisted with analyses of accounts of gender practices in consumption.

2. Transcription conventions: … represents talk omitted, Underlining represents louder talk, Italics represents emphasis, (text in round brackets) explain non-verbal communications, [text in square brackets] represents an explanation by the author, = Equals signs indicate overlapping speech, with two or more people speaking at once.